Residents and newcomers to Alaska alike these days take for granted the convenience of telephone lines for local and long-distance calls, faxing, and Internet dial-up service, plus myriad services such as call waiting and caller ID.

Cell phones are an integral part of our lives. In a given week, I may use mine to reach commercial fishermen in the middle of the Bristol Bay sockeye salmon fishery, or to talk to a friend in the Brooks Range, who's calling in from a sheep hunting camp on his satellite phone to the home I share with my dog team.

All over Alaska, residents have phones in their homes and businesses, fax machines and Internet access, and yes, cell phones.

We are very state of the art, especially considering how big Alaska is geographically and how far we've come in a relatively short time.

When I arrived in Alaska in the mid-1960s, I was introduced to party lines, an old-fashioned system in which several subscribers shared a single phone line. It was common to have to share a party line with others for up to a year before an actual private phone line became available. We'd pick up the phone, hear someone already talking on it and hang up, hoping the other party would hear our phone “click” and end their call shortly.

Long-distance calls required operator assistance, and that could get interesting. We'd dial the operator and request to make a person-to-person call to New Jersey, for example, and the operator would ask where we were calling from and our phone number. The minute we said “Alaska,” we knew what was coming: a five-minute conversation with the operator, answering all her questions about Alaska, especially “How cold is it really?”

Folks on a tight budget often would find a ham operator to patch them through to local phones in the continental U.S., for the price of a local call.

A decade later, many rural communities still had only one phone, which wasn't always working. In 1976, as a news writer at CBS News in New York, I called the only phone in Shungnak, in northwest Alaska, for an on-the-scene report of a forest fire from a resident I knew there.

Nowadays in Alaska, just about everyone has a home phone and a cell phone. Last summer, en route to Fairbanks, I spotted a major forest fire along the Parks Highway, about 100 miles south of Fairbanks. “Ha,” I thought, “fat chance my cell phone will work here.” But it did. I got through immediately to the Associated Press with breaking news about the raging fire. As I hung up, the story filed, I kept thinking, “Wow, what a great connection.” I love it, and no, I never take it for granted.
Reporter for the Alaska Journal of Commerce margie.bauman@alaskajournal.com